A Writer's Notebook (88 page)

I wonder if the form of a story isn't a sort of
memoria technica
that holds it in your memory. Why does one remember Guy de Maupassant's best stories,
Boule de Suif, La Maison Tellier, L'Héritage
so clearly after forty years? It is not only the anecdote. The anecdote is no better than in a thousand other stories one has read and forgotten. This reflection has been occasioned by a story of G's. It has been in several anthologies, and I think he was a trifle hurt that I didn't put it in mine. He writes with distinction, and he has the peculiar American felicity for describing the feel, the scent, the impression of an environment. The story was interesting and complicated; but it fell into two parts, each of which would have made it a good story, and he hadn't had the sense of form to combine them into a unity.

I think you must make sure not to divide the interest in a story; Chekov, however haphazard his appear sometimes,
took care never to do this. In fact, in a story as in a play, you must make up your mind what your point is and stick to it like grim death. That is just another way of saying that it must have form.

Some American Delusions.

Of all the hokum with which this country is riddled the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions. I was asked one day out West to lunch with a woman who, I was told, had twenty millions. I have never seen a duke in Europe treated with such deference as she was. You might have thought that every word that issued from her opulent lips was a hundred-dollar bill that the guests would be allowed to take away with them. It is true that there is a pretence that one man is as good as another, but it is only a pretence. A banker will talk in the club car of a train to a travelling salesman as though they were equal, but I am not aware that he will dream of asking him to his house. And in such communities as Charleston or Santa Barbara the travelling salesman's wife, however charming and cultivated, will never succeed in making her way into society. Social distinctions in the final analysis depend upon money. The great English lords of the eighteenth century were not treated by their inferiors with the obsequiousness which now turns our stomachs because of their titles, but because of their wealth, which, with the influence it gave them, enabled them to grant favours to their friends and dependents. With the industrialisation of England they lost,
great part of their wealth and with it their influence. If they have managed to maintain themselves in some measure as a class apart it is due to the innate conservatism of the English. But they no longer enjoy the same consideration. It was properly respectful dearly to love a lord when there was something to be got out of him, but now that he has nothing to give you it is contemptible.

But it is a mistake to suppose that class distinctions exist only in the upper and middle classes of society. In England the wife of the skilled artisan looks upon herself as a cut above the wife of the common labourer and will not consort with her. I know of a mushroom city in the Far West which was built only a few years ago to house the employees of a great factory. White-collars workers and factory hands live in adjoining blocks in houses built on the same pattern and as like as peas; they eat the same canned goods, read the same papers, go to the same movies, drive the same automobiles; but the wives of the white-collar workers will not play bridge with the wives of the factory hands. It looks as though the existence of class distinctions is inseparable from life in the social state, and instead of denying its existence it would be more honest to admit it.

I wonder that the people who are concerned for the survival of democracy are not anxious at the inordinate power it gives to oratory. A man may be possessed of a disinterested desire to serve his country, he may have wisdom and prudence, courage and a knowledge of affairs, he will never achieve a political position in which he can exercise his powers unless he has also the gift of the gab. I was listening to some people the other day discussing the chances L. had of becoming prime minister and their opinion was unanimous that he had none because he was a poor speaker. I suppose they were right, but is it not frightening that the indispensable qualification a politician needs to conduct the complicated business of a modern nation is a voice that sounds well over the air or the knack of inventing
striking phrases? It is only a happy accident if he combines these gifts with common-sense, integrity and foresight. The appeal of oratory is not to reason, but to emotion; one would have thought that when measures that may decide the fate of a nation are under consideration it was pure madness to allow opinion to be swayed by emotion rather than guided by reason. Democracy seldom had a ruder shock than when a phrase—you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold—nearly put an ignorant and conceited fool in the White House.

Of course Mothers' Day is an ingenious device of the manufacturers to sell their goods, but they surely wouldn't buy costly space in the newspapers to advertise this occasion for giving unless the public response were satisfactory. They are trading on a sentiment. I have a notion that family affection is a great deal stronger in America than with us. People are expected to feel it and doubtless do. I was surprised to hear that a busy man in a busy office was to be away for a week because he had gone with his wife to bury her mother in some place no farther from New York than Bristol is from London. In England he might have gone to the funeral, but would have come back at the latest next day. What surprised me was not only that he felt it necessary to absent himself for so long from his urgent affairs to support his wife in the distress which for all I know she felt, but that his employer, notwithstanding the inconvenience it caused him, looked upon it as right and proper. During this war I have seen instances of the passionate affection that exists between son and mother and between mother and son. Once at Pennsylvania Station, waiting for my train, I saw a group of draftees who were going to camp. There was one woman, a stout, homely little grey-haired woman, who clung to her boy, her arms clasped round his waist, with an expression on her face of despair. She might have been a mistress parting from her lover, yet the boy was only going into training and there was no chance of his being sent overseas for
many months. In England that mother, if she had come to the station to see her son off at all, would have kissed him lightly when the gates were opened and said: “Well, good-bye, old boy. Be good,” and with a smile and a wave of the hand walked away. I have seen soldiers in the U.S.O. clubs so homesick that they were pitiful.

In England mothers have been parting from their sons for three hundred years, sometimes knowing it was for ever, and have come to look upon it as too normal an event to make a fuss about. It is true that in the development of America families going West went together, and the hardship and danger they had to encounter may have strengthened the tie between them; but after all, thousands of adventurous young men went off alone, and there is no sign in the letters or memoirs of the time to indicate that their departure filled their parents with anguish. There is nothing to show that the women left behind when the whalers went out from New Bedford and Nantucket bore the separation with anything but fortitude. Isn't this emotionalism something of recent origin? I don't suppose anyone doubts that the Americans of today are more emotional than the English. They weren't, as far as one can tell, a hundred years ago. How has this come about? I can only suppose through the admixture of blood which has prevailed during the last two or three generations. Emotion is communicative; the sentimentality of the German, the excitability of the Italian, the effervescence of the Irishman, the susceptivity of the Jew, have overcome the reticent self-control of the New Englander and the pride of the Virginian. The stiff upper lip now is a sign of stupid insensibility. It gives occasion to a sneer or a wisecrack.

I often think how much easier life would have been for me and how much time I should have saved if I had known the alphabet. I can never tell where I and J stand without saying G, H to myself first. I don't know whether P comes before R
or after, and where T comes in has to this day remained something that I have never been able to get into my head.